Israel start-up Trellis Photonics, which developed an all-optical switching system, announced last Thursday that it will invest $25 million to establish a manufacturing plant alongside its management and marketing center outside of Washington and a manufacturing plant in Israel.
The planned centers, whose construction is scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 2001, will operate in addition to the company’s existing facilities in Israel: a technology R&D center in Jerusalem and a systems R&D center in Yokne’am. The existing centers will also be expanded. The expansion plans will create 650 new R&D, manufacturing and marketing jobs at the US and Israeli facilities over the next five years. Trellis management announced that the investment will enable the rapid acceleration of manufacturing plans for its switches using the WDM method.
Company founder Prof. Aharon Agranat said that the company’s technology will give communications providers significant savings in equipment investments. Trellis hopes to sell its technology to communications infrastructure manufacturers such as Nortel, Lucent or Cisco.
Prof. Agranat disclosed that Trellis’s strategic partners include the energy consortium Enron, whose communications division Enron Broadband Services claims – according to Agranat – that Trellis’s innovative technology will enable the division to realize its new business model. Another strategic partner is Agilent Technologies, which was spun off from Hewlett-Packard.
Agranat said that the establishment of the center in the US is unrelated to the security situation in Israel. “The Intifada has no effect on us,” he said.
Published by Israel's Business Arena on 19 November 2000